No More Lonesome Blue Rings
Michael Warren Lucas
Published by Tilted Windmill Press
All rights reserved, including the right of reproduction, in whole or in part in any form. This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author's imagination or used fictionally. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Cover image by Nexusplexus/Dreamstime
No More Lonesome Blue Rings
I'm the only human being in this universe with a blue tattoo ringing my wrist.
It's not a plain band. There's my name in block letters, SHERRY KAREN ROGERS. My birth date, 44 years ago. There's a barcode for my medical records. The fact that it's all in blue flags me as a Gerstmann-Straussler-Scheinker patient. At least it's a nice jewel blue.
The Creutzfeldt-Jakob patients have the same information, but in a red tattoo, also about an inch wide. They're pretty obvious just from their behavior, though. All sorts of things cause dementia, and by the time they rule out Alzheimer's and Huntington's and diabetes and all of the other possibilities, the CJD victim's personality has gone completely out of whack. Red Bands spend sunny days in a fenced park and rainy days inside a lovely room in the care facility. Some walk around freely or play simple games. Others are anchored to wheelchairs with padded straps. The caretakers wear protective gear. If you want to see panic, watch the staff scramble for heavy gloves when a Red Band bleeds.
This universe is close enough to ours to support our kind of life. Going through the Portal from Earth changes your biochemistry so you can survive in a universe with different physical laws, but this universe was similar enough to our own that we don't go mad. But this universe doesn't let prion diseases progress. Nothing can restore our smothered nerves, but we don't get any worse.
I suppose I'm lucky. I used to teach, pacing back and forth before my students. I started stumbling. Then I had trouble speaking. I'd been exposed to GSS twenty years earlier, after they'd identified prion diseases but before they broke the dimensional barrier, so I knew enough to demand the test. I can't speak much, but I'm still in here. I can build sentences, have a coherent conversation, spelling out the words on a touchscreen if the letters are big enough. They let me leave the clinic, walk down the beach or into the woods, so long as I don't go anywhere near the Montague research complex. The sand on the beach is a lot like home, though. The wind forms it into shallow dunes, the gray sea pummels it into hard-packed surface. When the weather changes and the wind rushes down the coast, loose sand skitters over the ground in long ribbons that constantly form and dissolve into each other. If I can ignore the yellow sky and the blue sun, the complete absence of birds and insects and anything else that might fly, and the taint in the air that I would swear is chlorine, I can pretend I'm at home.
I could go home any time. My GSS would pick up right where it left off, its exponential growth suspended but not slowed. I'd decay for another four or five years before dying, losing even more of myself every day. I used to be a woman of substance, a teacher, an author. People knew my name, sought my thoughts. Now I feel hardly human, a Swiss cheese of a person.
The staff in nice enough, but there's always a social and physical barrier between us. I'm a patient. You can't antiseptic away prions. Antivirals and antibacterials are useless. Fifteen minutes in an autoclave at three hundred degrees works, but it's hard on your staff. So is an hour in pure ozone. It's easier to be alone by myself than alone in company. Some days I walk the three miles to the fence.
The Montague Corporation had a long and bloody negotiation with the locals before getting the rights to build here. I'd never seen a local, but had heard that they looked nearly human. The trees looked like trees, the grass like grass, so people that looked like humans. Life had accidentally wandered between universes for millions of years before Montague learned how to do it on purpose. The locals have an official designation in some computerized catalog that nobody pays attention to, but in every universe they call the locals Townies.
I can't practice Tai Chi any longer. My plaqued nerves fire and misfire. I can't even meditate, as my body refuses to stay still. So I walk. If I move slowly and steadily I don't trip even though my muscles twitch and spasm. On my brother Gary's birthday, I'd packed a lunch and walked to the Northeast Stone.
Human territory has four borders, with a great stone at each. Humans were allowed within the rough four-hundred-square-mile quadrangle marked by the borders. They warned me about the townies, how they could do things impossible in our universe, and how they considered any human outside the boundary their property. The staff wouldn't give any patient any specifics, leaving us to create our own myths. I didn't know what Montague made in their plant, taking advantage of the slightly different laws of nature, but it made them enough money to tolerate the risks of that kind of neighbor.
Sitting with my back to the ten foot spire of the Northeast Stone in the robot-trimmed cool grass, equidistant between the perpendicular wire fences stretching out of sight, I carefully unwrapped my sandwich. I usually took some kind of self-warming meal – the canteen pasta isn't bad, and the soy cutlet actually has decent gravy if you can ignore the fact that it's soy. Today's lunch starred a peanut butter sandwich, Gary's favorite.
Gary's in a long-term care facility back on Earth. He was born with Angelman Syndrome. He was always happy, always friendly, but with an IQ around 60 he would never speak, and he'd need seizure medication throughout his life. I was just glad that he'd finally learned to use the toilet. I'd told Mom I would take care of my little brother before she died.
I ate my peanut butter sandwich and thought about my brother, now cared for by strangers. The fact that his smile was a symptom of his disease didn't change how much it had meant to me. I'd avoided marriage because of Gary, taught instead of having my own children. I didn't have Angelman, but my genes carried it.
And now, neither of us could speak. The thought was bitter.
The peanut butter tasted better than I remembered, thick and crunchy between my teeth. I was carefully licking excess off my twitching hand when the Stone vanished.
I almost fell over at the sudden absence. Both fences remained, each ten feet tall wire topped with nanoedged concertina wire. The edges had been anchored within the Stone. The metal mesh sang as it rippled and shuddered with the sudden release of tension. Wire shrieked against wire as the first posts in each line suddenly took up all the pressure.
My breath caught in my throat.
The south pole on the southbound fence screeched and bent, twisted by the tension hauling the wire mesh towards the other end.
My phone bleeped. I wear it strapped to my left forearm, so I don't have to get it out of my pocket. A message blared in large type: CODE FOUR.
The patients were known by colors, so emergencies were numbers. I'd seen a Code One once in the year I'd been here. As prescribed I sat in a chair and watched as the full-body-suit crew came in and bandaged a Red Band's skinned knee. At Code Three I was supposed to go to my room. They'd told me what Code Four was, but I couldn't remember at the moment. I dropped the rest of my lunch and tried to jump to my feet, but a shudder in my legs betrayed me and I fell back to the ground, sprawling on my side atop my banana and chips and cursing myself.
By the time I regained my feet, moving meticulously this time, my phone buzzed anew. TOWNIES INSIDE FENCE. ENGAGE WITH LETHAL FORCE.
In the distance, I heard the sudden rattle of firearms. It sounded too soft after what I'd heard in the movies, but the trees and hills dampened the noise. I took a step towards the medical compound, then stopped. Did I want to walk into a firef
ight? I'd never seen the guards around the patients carrying anything more than stunguns. The research complex was a mile beyond the dormitory. Did bullets that miss travel that far?
I gritted my teeth and started walking. From the hill closest to the clinic I could see what was happening. Either I stayed here and waited for whatever happened, or I tried to reach safety. I know people who claim that Tai Chi is a martial art, but even if Carry Tiger To Mountain or Needle at Sea Bottom could deflect bullets I shook too much to perform them. I had to reach people who could protect me.
Moments later, my phone buzzed again. I stopped walking so I could read the message.
BORDER STONES HAVE ALL MOVED 10 MILES EAST.
Relief shuddered through me. Until that message came, I wasn't aware of just how afraid I was that I'd hallucinated the Stone vanishing. Prion disease can't advance here, but I don't really know why or how. Or maybe I'd had a stroke. But I believed that a hallucination wouldn't be so coherent. I wouldn't hallucinate a text message confirming my earlier hallucination. The confirmation gave me the energy to pick up my speed just